The Return: Disney Lands Page 14

  “That was not supposed to happen,” the boy said, studying Finn like he was a specimen under a microscope.

  “That was so cool, dude,” Maybeck whispered. “You scattered like dust and then reassembled. Awesome effect.”

  Finn barely heard him. All his attention was directed at the boy in the cap; to the lines of his face. “I know who you are!” His voice was a whispered shout, a dying cry. “I know you!”

  The kid’s blue eyes sparkled with mirth. He allowed himself a gentle, familiar smile. He laughed.

  FINN AND MAYBECK RETURNED as a pair onto the rump of Jingles, just behind a young boy dressed as Woody. Breathless, Finn pulled Maybeck off the horse and, amid shouting from the ride operator, off the carousel itself.

  As they ran, Finn marveled at how, this time, he remembered everything. He knew they’d been in Disneyland of old; he knew the date they’d been there, the weather; that a television crew had been setting up for the historic opening of the park. He knew who had arranged it all, too, but he had yet to allow the name to leave his lips. It filled the hollow spot in his chest, though; it swelled with warmth and happiness and excitement. He felt teased by possibility. He wanted to jump back onto Jingles and take another ride.

  “What the hey?” Maybeck said. “Why’d you pull me off like that?”

  Finn, about to rip him, recalled his own first ride on Jingles and softened. Still, he rushed his words. “I know you don’t remember anything, Maybeck, but you gotta trust me. We have to get to Central Plaza. We’re gonna return.” He and Maybeck were three-dimensional, full-color holograms once more, to Finn’s delight. “Stay all clear,” he added. “Version 1.6, remember? We can’t afford fear.”

  “Got it.”

  “Are you sure? Can you rise above it?”

  “It’s Disneyland, man. Check it out.”

  Finn did. The lights were bright and high, the sounds of traffic pronounced. The guests wore normal clothes. It was night, not day, as it had been in the other Disneyland. Men and women—there were women everywhere—carried smartphones, and the only hats the men wore were baseball caps. A child slurped loudly on a plastic straw in a disposable cup, and Finn blinked, realizing he hadn’t seen a single piece of plastic on “the other side” (as he was now thinking of it).

  Maybeck was still looking too relaxed. The hazards of forgetting everything.

  “You remember what Willa told us about Mr. Toad?” Finn said pointedly.

  “Yeah, there is that. I hear you, man.”

  “Good,” Finn said, glad that Maybeck could recall the recent past on this side. “If we’re seen in the parks, the Imagineers are going to freak. They’ll ground us. We have to reach the plaza as quickly as possible! Keep your eyes peeled. We stay in crowds, hang close with our heads down. And we move fast.”

  “Aye, aye.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I can tell.”

  To their left a group of five life-size playing cards materialized—four Jacks and a Queen. They were from the Mad Tea Party attraction. They turned to face the boys and, as they did, a crowd immediately formed as if this was a street show.

  “Bad news,” Finn said, sticking his arm out to stop Maybeck as he put on the brakes. “If they’re interested in us, they’re OTs.”

  “It’s worse than you think,” Maybeck said. “How much do you know about Jacks?”

  “Zero.”

  “I studied this stuff in a figure drawing class, and if these boys are from a French card deck, we’re in trouble. The four Jacks represented Europe’s greatest warriors, knights like Lancelot and the dude from the Iliad.”

  “I hated that book.”

  “Whatever. Hector was willing to die for anything he deemed right.”

  “They’re armed. They want to kill us.” Finn’s voice was flat, certain.

  “Or die trying,” said Maybeck. “You recognize the fifth.”

  “Is that—?”

  “The Queen of Hearts. Who, in my opinion, is just plain deranged.”

  Behind the boys another line of cards arrived, mostly clubs and spades with lower numbers.

  “What can they do?” Finn asked, pointing them out to Maybeck, who hadn’t seen them, his attention absorbed by the royal suits ahead.

  “Dude.” It came out: Doooood. Finn didn’t hear that tone from Maybeck often. It meant he didn’t like what he saw. It meant he was scared. “How can the OTs be back?”

  “Don’t allow the fear!” Finn said. “Do not let them pull you out of all clear.”

  “No one has to do that, man. I did it all by myself.”

  “Recover.”

  “As if. The OTs are dead!”

  APPARENTLY NOT, Finn wanted to scream. “I don’t think they’re organized. They’re like terrorists with no leader.” He hoped to sound bold and brave, but he knew the truth: he’d lost some of his all clear as well. This round to the cards, to their slow, ominous show of force. “I suppose,” he said, swiveling from front to back, trying to keep the enemy in full sight, “that the clubs can club us. And spades are shovels, so that’s not good, either.”

  “Don’t look now, but they’re forming a card house,” Maybeck muttered uncomfortably. “They look pretty organized to me!”

  On all sides, park guests stepped out of the way, enthralled with the cards’ lockstep movements, which were reminiscent of a marching band formation. The cards lined up, edge-to-edge and edge-to-face, in an octagon shape, the circumference of which was ever shrinking.

  “They’re boxing us in,” Maybeck said, spinning one way, then another.

  “Duh! I got that.”

  “Any ideas, Einstein?”

  Making the boys’ situation all the more dangerous, the cards morphed into three dimensions, horses growing forward out of the four Jacks, their hooves impacting hard on the ground. It looked as if the giant cards had cut the horses in half, leaving only the front of their bodies. Next, the Jacks’ arms lifted up and off the face of the cards. One held a mace, another a sword, a third a battle-ax, and the last a halberd. The crowd went wild.

  “Slice and dice,” Maybeck groaned.

  The guests cleared a wide space around the boys; they seemed to be expecting a show. When Maybeck or Finn tried to take so much as a step forward, the cards closed the gap. The boys were penned in on all sides, surrounded by a crazed Queen, four weapon-wielding warriors, and four additional six-foot-tall cards with three-dimensional clubs and spades waving.

  “We’re about to get hammered.”

  Finn barely heard Maybeck’s joke, his focus on how to survive in the face of such odds. “If we can all clear,” he whispered, the cards’ edges sliding on the card faces before them, the octagon shrinking, collapsing inward, “we can walk right through them.”

  “And if we could fly, we could fly over them, Peter.” Maybeck spun in a full circle, desperate. “I’m so far from all clear that I might as well not be a hologram.”

  “Yeah. What about going under them?”

  “Hey, I missed that,” Maybeck said, and there was sudden hope in his voice.

  The cards stood on their corners, raised up on a fold of paper that functioned as an ankle. The process of lifting bent the card slightly, creating a small gap beneath the bottom edge and the asphalt.

  “We’re thicker than that, though,” Maybeck said.

  “We’ll never budge a horse, but the others...” Finn spun to face the spades and clubs. Nines and tens mostly. Clubs flailing. Spades swinging.

  “We’ll get beaten to high heaven,” Maybeck said.

  The space narrowed again. If they didn’t do something, the boys were going to suffer.

  “No, look! There’s a pattern. Ten of clubs!” The spiky weapons struck out from the face of the card in two columns of four and a middle column of two. The top five lifted and fell in unison, their motion opposite that of the bottom five, which also rose and fell as one.

  “Got it!” Maybeck said. “We go on the next lift.”

&n
bsp; As the top five clubs lowered, the bottom group rose. The boys dove. Maybeck, who was taller, arrived first, thrusting his arm through the gap beneath the card. The card moved, but proved too heavy for a partial hologram.

  An instant later, Finn joined him, thrusting up with both arms. He slid his knees under him, and lifted with the full strength of his back. Together, he and Maybeck threw the card into the air.

  As it rose, the boys rolled, came to their feet and—

  —ran smack into a thick crowd of park guests.

  The cards were not pleased. They pivoted, producing a strong wind that swept hats off heads and sent stuff flying in all directions, and ran for the two boys. A spade caught Finn on the shoulder and dropped him to the pavement. Another smacked his head. Maybeck called out in pain as two clubs hammered his arms and shoulders with blows.

  The crowd cheered. As he struggled to sort out why any group would celebrate violence being done to a pair of boys, the spades rained down upon him. Shoulder. Forearm. Several blows to the head. He was losing consciousness.

  “Not...good...” he mumbled, having no idea if Maybeck could hear him.

  His vision blurry, Finn looked up and saw another spade, aiming directly at the top of his head. He knew he wouldn’t survive, not with his all clear spent, his body solid. He reflected on how many such battles he’d made it through in the past, how lucky he’d been, how he and his friends had been so sure the Overtakers were done, broken. Finished.

  They were wrong. At the very moment in which he and Maybeck had accomplished something fantastic and impossible—it was all about to end. And all before he could explore the new realm—the realm of the past.

  If he were to die anywhere, Finn thought, watching the spade descend upon him, then Disneyland or the Magic Kingdom was the most fitting of places. He braced himself for the final blow.

  IT STRUCK LIKE A GUST OF WIND. Not wind generated by the cards. A ferocious gale-force blow, the kind that topples a beach house caught by the leading edge of a hurricane.

  Yet, it wasn’t wind. It was a force, like magnetism or gravity. The cards lifted like kites, flying horses, swinging clubs, and all. They crashed onto the roof of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, the crowd erupting at the sight in shouts, whistles, and cheers.

  Finn skidded across the asphalt, caught up as inexorably as the cards. If he hadn’t been a partial hologram, his pants might have shredded at the knees. Oddly, his hair never waved; his shirt never ruffled. So if it wasn’t wind, what was it? he wondered.

  Maybeck, still standing, skated the same distance as Finn. The crowd parted, not impeding their travel. Finn spun around into the direction of the dying wind, and he saw her. His earlier text, suggesting they might have a moment to meet, hadn’t been ignored. He had not expected it to be like this.

  A girl. A girl that made his chest tight and his voice catch. She stood out from the crowd, a few kids just behind her fading from Finn’s vision as if they were nothing.

  “Amanda?” That was Maybeck.

  It was Amanda—and Jess. And beside them, a tall kid with crazy black hair.

  “Look out!” the tall boy shouted.

  Two of the horses and their cards jumped from the roof and landed effortlessly on the ground. The Jack of Hearts raised his sword, drawing it back over his shoulder.

  But as he raked his arm forward, preparing to cleave Maybeck’s head in half, the sword stayed behind. His chain mail glove swung down, empty-handed. The sword, its sharpened tip pointing toward the sky, floated off the horse and stopped some four feet from the ground.

  “Knaves!” the Jack of Hearts cried, his horse rearing up and neighing. “My sword is possessed! Cursed! These lads are of the black magic. It’s the work of the Magi.” He pointed to Maybeck. “You will die, sorcerer! But another day!”

  He continued to back away; the other cards slipped off the roof and gathered about him. As one, they turned and ran; the Jacks rode, the Queen of Hearts trailed.

  Once they were a safe distance away, she waved her scepter in a broad sweep. She led the other cards in the direction of their attraction. As they ran, they dissolved, like ash.

  The air seemed to move; some people in the crowd lost their balance, as if they’d been shoved aside. The Jack’s sword flew toward Finn and clanked to the pavement at the last second, skidding within inches of his feet.

  Thunderous applause sounded. Amanda rushed to Finn and Maybeck, apologizing as she ran. “I’m so sorry!”

  “Sorry?” Maybeck said incredulously.

  “You saved us,” Finn said, throwing his hologram arms around her. He squeezed, but his hologram arms passed through her body—he’d returned to all clear. Jess and the tall boy laughed. The crowd oohed.

  Focusing on making his hands solid, Finn bent and hoisted the sword, the gesture driven by curiosity, not triumph. The crowd misunderstood and cheered loudly.

  “Did you see that...” he asked Amanda, “...ghost?”

  “Ah, yeah. Actually, that’s Emily, a friend of mine,” Amanda said. “You’re going to like her.”

  “SO YOU’RE SAYING YOU SAW ALL THIS, but Terry didn’t?”

  Connected by video on Willa’s tablet, Charlene’s voice was clear, even though her image was not. She’d just come from a shoot for her television show, meaning her hair was perfect, her makeup was perfect; she was perfect. But her perfect voice expressed only cynical disbelief as she said, “And why is that?”

  The four other Keepers sat on the kitchen countertops in Maybeck’s Aunt Bess’s house, competing for space with pieces of pottery in all stages of completion. The kitchen cabinets’ glass fronts offered a view to even more artistic mugs, plates, bowls, and cups in a rainbow of colors and an assortment of shapes.

  On the counter, the kids nibbled oatmeal cookies that Bess had baked specially for them. Like Mrs. Whitman, Bess supported the Keepers and believed in their cause.

  Finn, bruised and sore from the battle with the cards, kicked his legs back against the cabinet behind him and sighed. The Keepers had ambushed him. He’d gone to Maybeck’s to collect the second folder, only to find Willa and Philby there as well—along with the video connection to Charlene in Los Angeles. Philby wouldn’t agree to cross Finn back into Disneyland without a full explanation and group consensus. At the moment, it wasn’t going terribly well. Finn had withheld the most important piece of information, fearing he might hit the resistance he was now encountering.

  “Remember,” Finn said to Philby, “Mom telling us about people who claimed to have time traveled, that they ended up in loony bins? First of all, that’s how you’re treating me.” He spoke now to them all. “Second, to answer your question, Charlie, what if memory, my ability to retain events, is being controlled by whoever made this happen?”

  “Finn’s onto something, you guys,” Maybeck said. “I remember nothing about what happened. Zero. Zilch. I climbed onto Jingles, and then Finn was pulling me off.”

  “So?” Charlene again, on the tablet. “Maybe that’s all there was to it!”

  “No. Think for a sec! That’s exactly what happened to Finn the first time he crossed over. Right? He remembered nothing.”

  “I love you, Finn. You know that!” Charlene said argumentatively. “Seriously, I want to believe you traveled back in time to a couple days before Disneyland officially opened. I mean, who wouldn’t want to believe that? But do you know how deranged this sounds? Black-and-white? Jumping out of a television and then back in? The next thing you know, you’ll be telling us you met Wayne and Walt and took a tour of the park before it opened.”

  “Not that last part,” Finn said.

  The three faces in the kitchen turned in his direction.

  “Now this is getting interesting,” Philby said.

  “There was a guy our age,” Finn said. “Wearing one of those flat caps, like in Newsies. He was spying on me and Maybeck. Didn’t seem the least bit weirded out by a pair of black-and-white two-dimensional projections trying to hide beneath t
he staircase to Walt’s apartment.”

  Finn hadn’t just waded into the water. He’d dived in. But he figured it was too late to ease into the truth. Better to make a splash. “He waved us over to him and we went.” He paused, looked at his friends’ faces. Philby: excited interest. Willa: skeptical fascination. Maybeck: confusion. But Charlene didn’t so much as twitch. Maybe the screen had frozen. “He asked me—not Terry, me—for the IAV file. He expected me to have it. I handed it over, explaining that Terry’s half hadn’t projected properly. He didn’t seem to question that explanation, which made me realize he must be the guy who’d done this. Once we’d returned, Terry and me, I thought about it some more. You know what’s in those files? Philby?”

  Philby’s voice was hushed and reverential. “The first folder was the schematics for the shadow mask cathode ray tube color television. But the second folder involves—get this!—white-light transmission holography, a technology developed by Polaroid in the late nineteen sixties.” He paused. “Combined, they’re the ingredients for—”

  “Color holograms!” Willa blurted out. “Finn brought this guy the schematics to project DHIs,” Willa said.

  “One can’t have black-and-white, two-dimensional projections trying to find Walt’s pen and putting it back where it belongs.”

  “You see?” Finn pleaded. “You see how it fits together and makes sense?”

  “No,” Charlene said. So the tablet hadn’t frozen after all, Finn thought wryly. “I don’t want to be the jerk here, and I think that’s what I’m being, and I’m so sorry, you guys.”

  “I was the one there, and I don’t fully believe it,” Finn said. “You have every right to doubt, Charlie.”

  “The thing is,” Willa said, “it does make sense. It adds up. Holography was theorized in 1947 by a scientist working with microscopes. What held up its full development was...any guesses?...the lack of color light waves and multisource projection imaging. Single source, single color light didn’t work.”

  “Let me guess,” Philby said. “All it gave you was two-dimensional, black-and-white projections?”